Chapter 785 - 743: S3, Server Launch_3

At this moment, they could only use the Ion Thruster, which exerted extremely gentle thrust, also known as electric propulsion. Multiple Ion Thrusters were distributed across the nodes of Artemis’s memory alloy skeleton, capable of applying adjustments quite delicately on the reflective surface.

Should an accident occur with the reflective surface, the secondary attitude control system would no longer be able to cope with the force of solar pressure and would simply shut down automatically to protect the delicate reflective surface, and the primary attitude adjustment system would not even be activated.

What was happening now was precisely this, Artemis had detected a load from the solar pressure that was too strong, and the computer had triggered an alarm to execute a protection program to prevent a secondary accident.

This also meant that Artemis would completely lose control, allowing its attitude to change freely until external interference decreased and it would then attempt to retract back to normal.

The entire Artemis team had not anticipated this situation at all and was dumbstruck, scrambling to gather more information.

However, right after that, the signal began to become unstable and intermittent, neither ground monitoring stations nor satellites were able to receive a stable signal, resulting in almost complete loss of contact.

At that moment, they still did not know what had caused this, but that was Artemis, worth more than its weight in gold, so they hastily reported the situation to Robert, who was on his way to check on what was happening.

When Robert arrived, the situation had not improved, and just as everyone was beginning to feel heavy-hearted, worrying about a potentially unprecedented huge loss to NACA, emergency calls began to ring.

The Presidential Palace, the Pentagon, and big-wigs linked to them were all frantically calling NACA, asking what had happened.

At this point, Robert’s mind was in chaos, having no idea what had happened, when suddenly an employee jumped up and shouted:

"It’s over, Artemis is tumbling!"

Before anyone could realize what he meant, he had impatiently jumped onto the table to explain:

"The deployment process of Artemis is irreversible! Now, with the system that counters the solar pressure shut down abnormally, whether or not it is fully deployed, it will at least receive the majority of the solar pressure and because it lacks corrective adjustments, it will spin or even tumble due to the uneven forces!

Gentlemen, that is a 250-acre super reflector, able to bounce back the sunlight as well as other electromagnetic waves. Its curved surface will focus and reflect all electromagnetic waves, including visible light, like a gigantic light bulb!"

All those present were technical staff and instantly understood what he meant.

Light is a kind of electromagnetic wave, just like how a flashlight pointed at a mirror reflects light and causes interference in the environment, electromagnetic signals near Earth’s orbit will be similarly disrupted, reflected by Artemis.

Although Artemis’s own size was minuscule compared to Earth, its reflective area was frighteningly large. With a specially optimized design, it would collect as much light as possible and project it onto the Earth’s surface, with a maximum impact range of over 300 kilometers!

If it were only sunlight it might not be so bad, but if it were high-power communication satellites or spacecraft-relayed signals, it would spell disaster if they were intercepted:

The super-large curved surface would act like an unprecedented high-gain antenna, super-amplifying the received signals and changing their direction, further disrupting other nearby signals.

This had been considered at the early stages of Artemis’s development, but back then NACA assumed it would operate at geostationary orbit altitude, where it wouldn’t cause much interference with lower Earth orbits; they even considered using this feature to develop a low-cost broadcasting network, though they hadn’t yet figured out how to utilize it.

However, at lower Earth orbit altitude, this characteristic became a disaster. Both civilian communications and military satellites at this altitude had incredibly dense traffic, and the power of Artemis became extremely frightening; even disrupting just a portion could have a huge impact.

Even though NACA originally thought that a 10-minute solar window wouldn’t cause too much trouble, the reality was that with the attitude control system down, Artemis would continue disrupting the electromagnetic environment of near-Earth orbit until contact was restored, like a bright lightbulb in the darkness blinding the eyes.

Under its uncontrolled tumble, its loss of communication became understandable: High-orbit satellites and ground antennas could no longer align with its antennas!

This was a vicious cycle, and aside from hoping for Artemis to eventually recover on its own, the only solution was to shoot it down with a missile!

Robert could fully imagine the current situation: it was very likely that Artemis had caused serious interference with military satellites in the low orbit of the Eastern Hemisphere, even broadly affecting civilian satellites, and for countries in those regions, such a situation was essentially tantamount to the prelude to a nuclear war in their imagination.

First, electromagnetic interference destroys satellites, and what could be next, missiles?

If their early warning systems weren’t blind or deaf, they would immediately issue the highest alert, immediately preparing to welcome war!

So when Robert saw McMaster, he felt somewhat powerless because there was nothing NACA could do!

All he could hope for was that the deterrence system established over half a century would be effective, that the mutual trust between the parties had not deteriorated to a terrifying point and that they could restrain their fear and take the immense risk of not firing first.

If one party could not keep its calm, it would trigger a chain reaction that could never be stopped!